Tee and Fairway Aerification...

With the course being closed this week for fumigation of the Greens, we took full advantage of the opportunity to aerify Tees, Fairways, and Approaches. We have been very fortunate this Spring to have some great playing surfaces and we decided to further enhance them by reliving compaction through an aggressive aerification. On the Tees, we used our Toro ProCore 648 and used a .625" inside diameter tine on a 2.5" by 2" spacing. Once we aerified the Tees, we used metal drag mats to break up the cores and allow the river sand to follow back into the holes and also smooth out any imperfections in the surface while leaving the thatch on top of the surface to be blowed into the Roughs. We try to aerify Tees every year but this year we made a strong effort to finish them in one day, it took our staff approximately one and half days to complete Tees. We have a goal of aerifying the Tees one more time prior to the opening of the Greens, probably around the week after the 4th of July.

Our Fairways have been amazing this Spring and we decided to pull the trigger and get them aerified this week also. It still amazes our staff that the Fairways have not been aerified in at least 5 years, yet they still look great and drain fairly quickly considering the clay soils. We aerified these with a PTO driven John Deere 1500 and we went with a .750" inside diameter tine on a 3" by 3" spacing. The tine we used is called a "Green Bay" tine, as it is designed for the frozen tundra and other extremely dense soils. it has a wall thickness of .25" and is extremely durable. We have approximately 25 Acres of Fairways and our staff managed to aerify and clean up all of these surface in two full days. We used a metal drag mat on these surfaces as well, but once we separated the thatch from the clay we used a Toro 4500 with mulching blades to mulch and disperse the remaining soil. It was a very dusty and dirty job but it should help our Fairways out immensely.  We are planning on aerifying all Fairways again in early July and hope to make this a annual practice and not a special event.

Here is a picture of Israel beginning the aerification process on #1 Tee.

Here is a close up of the material that was pulled up on Tees. You will notice that the majority of the material on the surface is thatch as the river sand base has already fallen back into the aerification hole.

This is the two tractors in the beginning process of aerifying #4 Fairway. The yellow flags that you see are for marking irrigation heads or valves, drain basins, and granite yardage markers.

Here is an example of the common aerification core that we removed from the Fairways, it is easy to notice the clay soils at the bottom of the core and the thatch at the top of the core.

Here is our staff pulling the metal drag mats behind the carts to help disperse and break up the material.

This is the product prior to being blown off, with the forecasted rains and our fertility application next week we should see full recovery from this aerification in 10 to 14 days.

With the short grass verification completed, we will focus our efforts on aerifying the Roughs in between the cart paths and the Fairways and Greens. These are always so compacted due to the volume of carts that move through the property. We hope to finish these by Friday afternoon. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Thank you for taking a moment to read about our efforts to improve the conditions of Windermere Golf Club.

Strippers Bare All on the Greens...

I am not sure what you were expecting to see, but I am talking about stripping the thatch layer off of Greens in preparation for Mini Verde sprigs in less than two weeks. Our process evolved as the week progressed with our initial plan of a Deep Tine Aerification, followed by a double aerification using a 5/8" tine, then aggressively verticutting to remove as much thatch as possible, and finally rolling to smooth the surface. Everything was going great until we began verticutting and literally chunks of our 5/8" thick mat of thatch were coming up and other sections were still intact. After lengthy discussions about the cause and what to do going forward, we decided it was best to completely remove the entire thatch layer with a Sod Cutter and shovels.

Here is a picture of the sunrise that greeted us on Tuesday morning and we thought we were in store for a great week.

As the sun crested the horizon we began our process of deep tining to alleviate any layering within the soil profile that could create drainage issues over time. We used a tine that was 3/4" X 10" on 4" centers. Here is the machine on #1 Green.

Once the above process was finished on a green we began our double aerification of Greens using the Toro ProCore 648 with a Turfpride Core Collector, this combination may be the biggest improvement in our industry in many years. We used a 5/8" inside diameter tine on 2" centers, but going two directions allowed us to effectively remove 31% of the thatch layer. Our staff is aerifying #1 Green the second direction in the picture below.

For optimal effectiveness we try to offset our second direction by 35 degrees. Here is a picture of the greens after the deep tine and two directions of aerification.

Once we reached this process we rolled the Greens with our Salsco Roller and then used a 3 ton steel drum roller to firm the surface as we were about to verticut the remaining thatch layer. When we began the verticutting process our goal was to remove as much of the material as possible without have any voids in the thatch layer. The voids would create a large variation in the playability of the Greens as certain areas might be firmer or softer than other areas. Here is Zach Abernathy verticutting #3 Green, this is where we decided we have to do something drastic to fix the issue for the short and long term.

Our solution, strip the sod with a Sod Cutter and let all see the Greens while they are completely bare of a thatch layer. This was a very grueling task as we measured the weight of several 1 square foot areas and the average weight per area was 20 ounces. This does not seem like much but when you multiply that by 117,000 square feet, our staff shoveled 234,000 pounds of thatch off of the greens. This will allow is to begin the renovation process with 100% of the thatch removed, which is the most ideal situation for our club and the Greens for the future. Here is #13 Green prior to running the Sod Cutter.

Here is a photo of the same Green approximately halfway through using the Sod Cutter to separate the thatch layer from the original sand/peat mix that will encompass the Green and Tournament Collar.

Here is our staff shoveling the material during the clean up process, it took on average 1.8 man hours per 1000 square feet to clean up and haul the material away.

Once the material was removed we used our verticutter to smooth any flaws in the surface prior to rolling the Green. The verticutter was set at 1/8" below the surface to aid in soften the surface. Here is Tim Murdock on #13 Green.

We finished off the process by using a 3 ton vibratory steel drummed roller that we rented. This will smooth and compact the surface to ensure there is no settling once the sprigs are in place and we have begun the grow in process.

Thank you for taking the time to read our blog and we hope that we did not disappoint you by the title of today' blog. Remember, you can never judge a blog by its title. Please feel free to ask any questions and we will continue to update our Twitter account @WindermereTurf daily so feel free to follow us on there.